The Eclipse, a lauded indie Irish flick that debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival last year, just opened in D.C. this past week. And apparently, it’s not without some local influence.

According to the Washington Examiner’s Yeas & Nays blog, director Conor McPherson embellished the plot, which was supposed to be about a love triangle at a literary festival, by adding ghosts to the story after he made a visit to Georgetown.

“I really wanted to visit The Exorcist house and Georgetown. I just found it really, really inspiring,” he told Nikki Schwab and Tara Palermi. “People think I’m absolutely crazy saying all this.”

McPherson and Eclipse star Ciarán Hinds visited the Exorcist stairs before the movie’s special screening in D.C. at the Georgetown AMC on Tuesday, too.

Hinds, an “oh right, that guy” actor slated to play Dumbledore’s brother in the remaining Harry Potter films, was impressed.

“It just takes you right up in a very strange gray-lit area up there.”

Everyone’s been having a lot of fun with the New York Time’s interactive map of Netflix rentals by zip code. Above are the top ten rentals for Georgetown University’s zip code.

Neighborhood blogger Georgetown Metropolitan has compared rentals in the Georgetown neighborhood to rentals at Georgetown University and concluded that we’re not so different after all.

He was particularly heartened to see that we like serious films, just like Georgetown’s neighborhood residents, and that City of God was on our list, despite ranking below two brom-coms.

The implications are clear—in the future, Campus Plans should be negotiated over screenings of Frost/Nixon.

Broken Lizard—the sketch-comedy troupe behind films such as Super Troopers, Club Dread, and Beerfest—came to DC last Thursday as part of a nationwide comedy tour. Vox spoke with Steve Lemme about the group’s upcoming film, The Slammin’ Salmon, as well as Mike Tyson’s weaknesses, the group’s early days, and the food service industry.

How did Broken Lizard meet?

We met at college. Four of us were fraternity brothers—Jay [Chandrasekhar] and Kevin [Heffernan] were older than us and Eric [Stolhanske] and I were the younger guys. At that time, Paul [Soter] wasn’t anywhere near my radar screen. Jay was given the opportunity to direct something student-run, and he and Kevin decided to do a sketch-comedy show.

I auditioned for it … and ended up becoming the guy who would play the scumbag, the dirtball, or the dick in sketches … The first night 25 people showed up, but eventually we were turning people away from the door. We realized we had a good thing going, brought it to NYC, got into movies, and now we’re back on the road doing a live sketch-comedy tour.

What’s The Slammin’ Salmon about?

We play waiters in a restaurant that is owned by a Mike Tyson type of figure. He’s a retired Heavyweight Champion of the World. He’s a teddy-bear, but he’s also prone to throwing temper tantrums. He can break you neck with one hand if he wants to. Often he slides off into these tantrums.

One night, he ends up owing the Japanese Yakuza, so he has a contest with the waiters to see who can make the most money in one night. The winner he is going to give a cash prize to, but he is simply going to beat the shit out of the loser. That’s the movie. It’s our Glengarry Glen Ross, really.

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Excuse me, I believe you have my stapler…

In search of a way to support workers rights and hang out with the stars of a cult classic?  You’re in luck this Friday: Office Space will be showing in the ICC Auditorium at 8 p.m. and stars Stephen Root (Milton Waddams) and Gary Cole (Bill Lumbergh) will be on hand to discuss the film.

The program is part of the D.C. Labor Film Festival, put on by the AFL-CIO Washington D.C. Metro Council, with support from Georgetown’s own Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.  This year marks the 10th anniversary of the ode to employee rebellion, and the screening will include a raffle of Office Space memorabilia, including a red stapler.  You can RSVP for the event here.

If Office Space isn’t enough to satisfy your labor cinema cravings, the D.C. Film Festival is also showing The Philosopher Kings, a documentary about university janitors, at the ICC Auditorium tonight at 8 p.m.

This past Sunday was the Neil Patrick Harris Show the Emmys, and, if you’re anything like me, you probably gave up and went to go scrounge for food around the “TV movie or miniseries” categories. But guess what! One of those interchangeable, darkly lit dramatic scenes of emotional women was created by Hoyas! And it won, too!

Grey Gardens, an HBO made-for-TV movie, was co-written, produced and directed by one Michael Sucsy, who graduated from the SFS in 1995, and was co-produced by Lucy Barzun Donnelly, who graduated from the college that same year.

It won a whole SIX Emmys! Outstanding made for Television Movie, Best Lead Actress, Miniseries or Movie: Jessica Lange, Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie: Ken Howard, as well as three others in technical categories.

Grey Gardens, which also stars Drew Barrymore as the Beale daughter, is an adaptation of the much-reworked cult classic 1975 documentary of the same name, which showed the lives the Beale women, a mother and daughter who had once been wealthy and now lived in decaying squalor in a mansion called Grey Gardens in the Hamptons.

Scusy had been interested in the story from his summers spent there, and, upon seeing the documentary, contacted the family’s lawyers to adapt it. He benefitted from a box of memorabilia found by a friend of the Beales, and the movie deals with more of their earlier lives, as well as the more destitute condition they eventually found themselves in.

If you missed it, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to catch Grey Gardens on HBO during the next few weeks.

A TV show based on the Georgetown-centric Brat Pack classic “St. Elmo’s Fire” has just been picked up by ABC.  The original 1985 film—starring Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe,Demi Moore, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy and Mare Winningham as friends who had recently graduated from Georgetown and hung out at the Tombs stand-in, St. Elmo’s Fire —is one of Georgetown’s biggest cinematic claims to fame.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, the show is going to maintain the movie’s Georgetown setting and is being produced by, among others, Joel Schumacher (the co-writer and director of the  film) and actor Topher Grace.

The show’s writer, Dan Bucatinsky, told the Hollywood Reporter that the whole six-young-friends-in-a-city-who-hang-out-at-an-eatery set-up may seem a little reminiscent of Friends, but that’s sort of what they’re going for.

Filmfest DC, the annual international film festival that calls the District home, is well underway this year. The April 16th grand opening has come and past, but this festival still has a few days worth of tricks left up its sleeve before it closes Sunday.

A single, $10 ticket will give you an evening’s worth cinema, discussing topics varying from a humanistic perspective on governmental roles in society to snapshots of cultures completely different from our own.

The “Views From The News” series, which includes India’s A Wednesday and other films from the United States, exhibits the complexities of human ideologies conflicting with superior policing forces. Other highlights in the series include the upcoming showing of Kirk Mangels’ Un-Natural State and Patrick Creadon’s I.O.U.S.A., as well as the opportunity to meet many of the production staffs involved in the making of the films.

For a full schedule of events, head over to the Filmfest DC itinerary. Tickets can be purchased an hour prior to the day’s first showing (6:30 pm Monday through Friday, 2:45 pm on Saturday, and 4:00 pm on Sunday). Advance tickets can also be purchased at www.tickets.com.

I’m probably the biggest fan there is of GPB’s free weekend movie showings, but sometimes it might be nice to actually see something good, on a real projector, in a real theater, on a weekend after a nice long night of drinking. For those times, E Street Cinema (555 11st NW), the fabulous home of indie movies, is taking up the venerable tradition of midnight showings. They’ll be showing a different “cult classic” each weekend from now until the end of the year.

Shows are Friday and Saturday nights at midnight, and tickets are $8 with a student ID. Here’s the schedule:

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Could a film set in Georgetown have been in the cards for Paul Newman? As director Whit Tillman tells it, he and producer Ronane Glennane had dreams of Newman and his wife starring in their remake of the French film Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud:

“Soon we were planning a film set in Georgetown, with Newman to be a retired, Eugene McCarthy-like senator working on his memoirs with a brittle yet beautiful English woman… As we traipsed through Georgetown planning the film, it was if Newman were with us, his senator character dominating our thoughts.”

Their project stalled (rights to remake European films are hard to come by, Tillman said), and the two never felt far along enough in the planning stages to approach Newman.

Still, in a city where filmmakers usually only stop by to get a few shots of the Washington monument, the idea that a director wanted to set a film in Georgetown—and bring Newman along for the ride—is pretty cool.

Nanking, a film about Japanese attack on China’s capital, was screened last semester at Georgetown. It was followed by a Q&A session with the film’s producer, Washington Capitals owner and Georgetown alum Ted Leonsis.

Leonsis’s new film, Kicking It, tracks the lives of six homeless people playing soccer in the Homeless World Cup. You can hold your own special screening, either by checking the documentary out at your local movie theater or by ordering it from Netflix after the DVD release.